WHAT DOES RESISTANCE DO TO YOUR BODY, MIND, HEART & SOUL
What happens when you resist ageing? Chronic stress, faster cellular ageing, cognitive decline & emotional turmoil. Discover the science—and the alternative
In this Article:
INTRODUCTION
What you resist doesn't vanish. It gets stuck.
What you acknowledge? That's what you can actually work with.
I'm Penelope. I'm 68, and for years, I resisted getting older.
I didn't call it resistance. I called it 'staying positive' or 'fighting ageing' or 'not giving up.'
But resisting what's actually happening—pretending you're fine with ageing when you hate parts of it, or fighting reality instead of acknowledging it—that resistance has a cost.
A real, measurable, physiological cost. To our body, our mind, our heart, and our soul.
Let me show you what resistance actually does..
WHAT RESISTANCE DOES TO YOUR BODY
Let's start with your body because this is where resistance shows up first.
When you resist what's happening—when you fight ageing, deny it, pretend you're fine when you're not—your body goes into chronic stress.
Not the acute stress of running from danger. Chronic, low-grade stress that never turns off.
Your body floods with cortisol—the stress hormone. And cortisol, when it's chronically elevated, does very specific things:
It increases inflammation throughout your body. Inflammation speeds up cellular ageing. It weakens your immune system, so you get sick more often. It disrupts your sleep, which makes everything worse. And it literally ages your cells faster than time does.
There's research showing that chronic psychological stress—like resisting reality—shortens your telomeres. Those are the protective caps on your DNA. Shorter telomeres mean faster ageing.
So when you stand in front of the mirror hating what you see and telling yourself you shouldn't look like this, shouldn't feel like this, should be handling it better, your body responds with stress. And that stress ages you faster than the ageing you're resisting.
You're literally ageing yourself faster by fighting it.
WHAT RESISTANCE DOES TO YOUR MIND
Now let's talk about your brain. Because resistance doesn't just affect your body—it exhausts your mind.
Suppressing your real feelings takes mental effort. Your brain has to work constantly to push down what's true.
There's research on this—it's called 'thought suppression.' When you try not to think about something, your brain actually has to think about it more to monitor whether you're thinking about it.
So when you tell yourself don't think about how much you hate getting older, don't focus on the losses, just stay positive—your brain is working overtime. And that work depletes your mental resources.
The result? You have less mental energy for everything else. Memory suffers, focus suffers. Problem-solving gets harder.
And here's the cruel irony: all that effort to suppress the negative thoughts? Well, it doesn't work. Suppression makes intrusive thoughts worse, not better. The thing you're trying not to think about keeps coming back stronger.
Plus, chronic stress from resistance shrinks your hippocampus—the part of your brain responsible for memory. So you're working harder to remember things while simultaneously damaging the part of your brain that helps you remember.
Fighting reality makes you mentally tired, mentally foggy, and actually damages your brain's capacity to function well.
WHAT RESISTANCE DOES TO YOUR HEART
Body and mind are struggling. Now let's talk about your heart—not the physical organ, but your emotional life.
When you resist what you're feeling—when you tell yourself you shouldn't hate getting older, you should be grateful, you should just accept it—you disconnect from yourself.
Emotional suppression doesn't make feelings go away. It just buries them. And buried feelings don't disappear—they leak out as irritability, numbness, anxiety, or sudden breakdowns (or overreactions) over small things.
Research shows that people who chronically suppress emotions have higher rates of depression and anxiety. They also struggle more with emotional regulation—small frustrations feel enormous because there's a backlog of unfelt feelings underneath.
And here's what hurts most: when you can't acknowledge your own struggles, you can't ask for help. Because asking for help requires admitting something's hard.
So you end up feeling isolated. Pretending you're fine, and struggling alone. And the loneliness compounds the stress, which compounds the ageing.
Resisting your feelings doesn't make you strong. It makes you disconnected, brittle, and alone.
That's what resistance does to your heart.
WHAT RESISTANCE DOES TO YOUR SOUL
And finally, soul. Meaning and life purpose. The part of you that asks why does this matter?
When you spend all your energy resisting reality—fighting what is, denying what's hard—you have no energy left to build meaning in your life, that so important sense of purpose.
You can't grow from something you won't acknowledge. You can't find purpose in a struggle you're pretending doesn't exist.
Resistance keeps you stuck in this shouldn't be happening. But it is happening. And while you're fighting that truth, you miss the question that actually matters:
“Now that this is happening, who do I want to become? What do I want my future life to look like, feel like and be like?”
That's the soul question. And resistance makes it impossible to ask.
WHAT CHANGES WHEN YOU STOP RESISTING
So what's the alternative?
Not wallowing. Not drowning in self-pity or despair. But acknowledging what's actually true.
I hate that my body is falling apart AND I'm still here, still building something.
Both are true. You hold both.
When you stop resisting, your body relaxes. The chronic stress response lowers. Your mind stops exhausting itself. When you stop suppressing feelings, your heart can be honest. And your soul can ask: What do I want to build from here?
That's what my work teaches. Not how to love ageing. How to stop resisting it so you can actually live in it.
If you're exhausted from fighting reality, my courses and these Ageing Honestly letters show you another way.
What you resist doesn't vanish. It gets stuck.
What you acknowledge? That's what you can actually work with.
Closing Thoughts
If this resonates with you, please comment below and share it with someone who might be struggling with the same feelings.
Ready to stop fighting your age and start building actual strength? Subscribe to Ageing Honestly HERE for bi-weekly essays and videos that tell the truth about what ageing asks—and what it gives back. Real talk, no anti-ageing messages, and no forced positivity.
And remember - you're not just ageing. You're evolving and deepening and expanding in wisdom, fulfillment, purpose, courage, and joy. You're finding yourself again, one honest moment at a time.
Penelope Lane is a therapist, mindfulness teacher, and fitness and brain health trainer who helps women over 60 build whole strength—body, mind, heart, and soul. At 67, she's learned the hard way that staying alive isn't the same as feeling alive.
